History of Finance: Wall Street Corners Mark It

The enduring symbols of Wall Street's fabled, turbulent history are inescapable on this walk through the epicenter of American capitalism.

Vladislav Prokopov of Russia, left, a student at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania takes a...

Vladislav Prokopov of Russia, left, a student at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania takes a picture while standing in front of the former US Custom House (now the National Museum of the American Indian) during the 20th annual guided walking tour of Lower Manhattan sponsored by the Museum of American Finance last month. This unique tour is the only regularly scheduled event that commemorates the Great Crash of 1929, the Panic of 1907 and the 1987 stock market collapse, along with the political, financial, real estate and architectural history of Wall Street and New York City.

(Craig Ruttle/AP Photo)
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Over there, at 23 Wall, is the former headquarters of J.P. Morgan's banking dynasty, its granite facade still scarred by pockmarks from a terrorist bomb that killed 33 people in 1920. A block away, a skyscraper at 48 Wall occupies the site of the city's first bank, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784. Names like Rockefeller, Roosevelt and Goldman Sachs are invoked at almost every turn.

The past, as outlined during a recent three-hour "Great Wall Street Crashes Walking Tour," takes on greater meaning in the current economic crisis — an ongoing story of boom and bust, bull markets and bailouts, recessions and recoveries.

October historically being the cruelest month on Wall Street, emphasis is on the October 1929 stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression and a decade of Dickensian deprivation for many Americans, that ended only with World War II.

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"If we've learned anything from history, it is that history repeats itself," says Richard Warshauer, a real estate executive who founded the tour 20 years ago after the crash of 1987. His partner, James Kaplan, puts a more optimistic twist on that lesson: "Wall Street always comes back — every time there's been a crash, there's been a rebound. In order to have a rise, you have to have a fall."

On a recent rainy Saturday, Warshauer and Kaplan led some 30 people on the tour, which is offered annually, beginning at the Museum of American Finance, itself an engrossing presentation of history from the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam to the modern Wall Street of glass and steel towers.

Warshauer and Kaplan noted that the United States had barely become a nation before facing its first economic crisis — the panic of 1792. Fortunately, Hamilton, wisely chosen by President George Washington to manage the nation's money matters as Secretary of the Treasury, rode to the rescue.

By having the federal government assume the new states' Revolutionary War debts and pay those off at 100 cents on the dollar, Hamilton established America's credit and credibility abroad, and himself as "the patron saint of American finance," Warshauer said.